A Novel Approach for Effective Partially View-Aligned Clustering With Triple-Consistency

Multi-view clustering (MVC), which integrates information from multiple views to enhance performance, has garnered increasing attention in recent years. Partially View-aligned Clustering (PVC), which is a particularly critical aspect of this process, requires a thorough exploration of complementary and consistent information under conditions of partial view alignment. However, most existing PVC methods primarily focus on semantic consistency, employing semantic consistency features for both view alignment and clustering tasks. These methods neglect the effects of noise and complementary information across multiple views and the suitability of these features for clustering. To address these limitations, our approach aims to leverage three distinct types of consistency to extract semantic consistency features and clustering consistency features, which are specifically designed for view alignment and clustering tasks, respectively. By omitting the reconstruction process, we mitigate the adverse effects of mutual information and noise on view alignment. Specifically, we first exploit the structural consistency of similarity graphs across different views to guide feature extraction in view-specific autoencoders. This process produces structural consistency features that are both cluster-discriminative and structurally coherent. Subsequently, two separate multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) are trained via contrastive learning to extract semantic consistency features and clustering consistency features from the structural features. These features are optimized for their respective tasks. Ultimately, a self-paced style view alignment strategy is used to iteratively re-align the data based on semantic and clustering consistency while the model is optimized via the re-aligned data. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art multi-view approaches, highlighting its effectiveness in tackling the challenges of PVC. The code is available at https://github.com/kongyiH/TCLPVC.